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Topic: DJANGO UNCHAINED (Read 66721 times)

The "D" is silent, though the name of "Django Unchained's" eponymous gunslinger sounds like a retaliatory whip across the face of white slaveholders, offering an immensely satisfying taste of antebellum empowerment packaged as spaghetti-Western homage. Christened after a coffin-toting Sergio Corbucci character who metes out bloody justice below the Mason-Dixon line, Django joins a too-short list of slaves-turned-heroes in American cinema, as this zeitgeist-shaping romp cleverly upgrades the mysterious Man in Black archetype to a formidable Black Man. Once again, Quentin Tarantino rides to the Weinsteins' rescue, delivering a bloody hilarious (and hilariously bloody) Christmas counter-programmer, which Sony will unleash abroad.After "Inglourious Basterds" and "Kill Bill," it would be reasonable to assume that "Django Unchained" is yet another of Tarantino's elaborate revenge fantasies, when in fact, the film represents the writer-director's first real love story (not counting his "Badlands"-inspired screenplays for "True Romance" and "Natural Born Killers"). At its core is a slave marriage between Django (Jamie Foxx) and Hildi (Kerry Washington), torn asunder after the couple attempt to escape a spiteful plantation owner (Bruce Dern, blink and you miss him).

Brutally whipped and then resold to separate bidders on the Greenville, Miss., auction block, Django and his bride -- whose outrageous full name, Broomhilda von Shaft, blends epic German legend with the greatest of blaxploitation heroes -- possess a love too great to be shackled by slavery. But getting even with Dern's character doesn't feature on Django's agenda. After settling the score with his former overseers early in the film, he cares only about reuniting with his wife.

"Django Unchained" could also qualify as a buddy movie -- an odd twist, considering that Corbucci's original Django was a loner (as played by Franco Nero, who cameos in this film). Liberally reinventing a character bastardized in more than 30 unofficial sequels, Tarantino pairs this new black Django with a bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Posing as a dentist, Waltz's charming figure first emerges in the dead of night driving an absurd-looking carriage with a giant tooth bobbing on top -- the first indication of how funny the film is going to be.

As in "Basterds," Waltz's genteel manner masks a startling capacity for ruthlessness. This time, however, he's undeniably one of the good guys. Though he tracks and kills men for a living, the doctor is fundamentally fair, shooting only when provoked or justified. Happening upon Django's chain gang, Shultz offers to buy the slave from his redneck escorts. When they decline, he leaves the traders for dead and liberates their "property," enlisting Django in his bounty-hunting business.

Tarantino's on sensitive turf here, and he knows it, using these early scenes not only to establish the cruelty shown toward slaves in the South, but also to deliver the same sort of revisionist comeuppance Jewish soldiers took upon Hitler in his last picture. Ironically, as a well-read and clearly more enlightened German, Schultz is disapproving of Americans' claims to racial superiority, which positions him as the story's moral conscience. When the time comes, he will accompany Django to Candyland, the plantation where Hildi now resides under the thumb of the unctuous Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

But the film seems to be in no hurry to get there, focusing on Django's most unusual education -- killing white men -- for the first 90 minutes of the director's longest feature yet. Tarantino freely quotes from his favorite stylistic sources, whether oaters or otherwise, featuring lightning-quick zooms, an insert of unpicked cotton drenched in blood and a shot of Django riding into town framed through a hangman's noose. Early on, Foxx appears to be following Waltz's lead, but once the snow melts on the bounty-hunting subplot (an extended homage to Corbucci's "The Great Silence"), all traces of subservience disappear and Foxx steps forth, guiding this triumphant folk hero through a stunning transformation.

True to its spaghetti-Western roots, the pic reveals most of its stoic hero's unspoken motivations through garishly colored flashbacks, though Tarantino and editor Fred Raskin (stepping in for the late Sally Menke) seem to realize that limited glimpses of such white-on-black sadism go a long way. Filmmakers who choose to portray this shameful chapter of America's past bear a certain responsibility not to sanitize it. But here, even as it lays the groundwork for "Django's" vengeance, dwelling on such brutality can verge on exploitation. To wit, the film problematically features no fewer than 109 instances of the "N word," most of them deployed either for laughs or alliteration.

While good taste doesn't necessarily apply, comedy seems to be the key that distinguishes "Django Unchained" from a risible film like "Mandingo." Both take a certain horror-pleasure in watching bare-chested black men wrestle to the death -- the sick sport at which Candie prides himself an expert -- but what better way to inoculate the power of a Klan rally than by turning it into a Mel Brooks routine, reducing bigots to buffoons as they argue about their ill-fitting white hoods?

Using rap and other cheeky music cues to similar effect, the script repeatedly finds ways to use the characters' racism against them, most ingeniously in its somewhat protracted second half. According to Schultz, if he and Django were to show up at Candyland and offer to buy Hildi directly, they'd be laughed off the plantation, so they hatch a plan to pose as men looking to buy a mandingo fighter. Though there's a flaw to their logic, since the direct-request approach worked fine with Don Johnson's "Big Daddy" earlier, it allows the film to explore the complex caste system among slaves.

There are two things Tarantino, as a director, has virtually perfected -- staging Mexican standoffs and spinning dialogue for delayed gratification -- and expert examples of both await at Candyland. Seductively revealing a dark side auds have never seen before, DiCaprio plays Candie as a self-entitled brat, spewing the character's white-supremacy theories through tobacco-stained teeth. Like a Southern despot, he surrounds himself with menacing cohorts, none more dangerous than old Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who runs the affairs of Candie's household and represents a form of toxic black-on-black rivalry still smoldering in American culture today.

Gorgeously lit and lensed by Robert Richardson against authentic American landscapes (as opposed to the Italian soil Corbucci used), the film pays breathtaking respect not just to Tarantino's many cinematic influences, but to the country itself, envisioning a way out of the slavery mess it depicts. In sheer formal terms, "Django Unchained" is rich enough to reward multiple viewings, while thematics will make this thorny "southern" -- as the director aptly dubs it -- perhaps his most closely studied work. Of particular interest will be Tarantino's two cameos, one delivered with an Australian accent, and the other alongside Jonah Hill in the "baghead" scene.

An outsider at Millarworlder is now bragging how HE got to see an advanced screening of DJANGO! A non HEF member has seen DJANGO before ME, a founding member of the forum. This is a travesty and won't go unremembered.

I'm considering leading a boycott of the film because of this BUT I may still allow a pass.. for now!

I want my fellow supporters to practice the following chant just in case I decide to protest

Movie review: 'Django Unchained' is Tarantino unleashedThe filmmaker's audacious talents are given full rein in a wildly entertaining pre-Civil War epic whose comic flourishes only add to the gritty slavery drama's blistering power.

December 23, 2012, 2:55 p.m.Here is the particular brilliance of Quentin Tarantino: He can rip a horrific page out of history — for his latest, "Django Unchained," slavery in the antebellum South — put it through his favorite grindhouse mill, kick in biting comedy whose sheer audacity and searing irony demands laughter, and yet ... and yet ... never for a moment diminish or let us forget the brutal reality.

What the writer-director did so caustically to Nazis in 2009's "Inglourious Basterds" — scalping (literally) and roasting (comically) — was apparently just a warm-up.

In "Django," Tarantino is a man unchained, creating his most articulate, intriguing, provoking, appalling, hilarious, exhilarating, scathing and downright entertaining film yet. Even given the grand tradition of artists using their work for sharp social rebukes — Mel Brooks' genius swipe at Nazism in "The Producers," for one —Tarantino's mash-ups between the unconscionable inhumanity of others and his outrageous riffs on the matter defy comparison.

The four horseman of his apocalypse — Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson — come with guns and metaphors blazing. Their archetypes serve to mark out the battleground Tarantino bloodies with a vengeance that surpasses everything else in his archive, including "Kill Bill" volumes 1 and 2.

Django (Foxx), the slave/freeman; Dr. King Schultz (Waltz), the liberator; Calvin Candie (DiCaprio), the abusive plantation owner; and Stephen (Jackson), the sycophant house slave, provide the film's chaos and catharsis with every rise and fall of their clashes. The indictment comes with each stroke of the lash — and there are countless of them — none harder to watch than the whipping of Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Django's wife.

With Tarantino there's always a very specific artistic influence informing the theatrics on screen, and in "Django" the style is a priceless cut at spaghetti westerns. The primary homage is to the two Sergios (Corbucci, who introduced "Django" into the movie lexicon in 1966, and Leone, who created a fistful of classics). Whether it was nothing more than a creative choice or a latent desire to extend the Italian dominance of the genre across generations and borders, Tarantino has never seemed more comfortable in the saddle.

The film begins with a line of slaves shackled together on a forced march across a desert that is scorching hot by day, frigid by night. Title cards, which are dropped in periodically, their size a clue to significance, starts the timeline at two years before the Civil War. The arrival of Dr. Schultz, ostensibly a dentist, a giant tooth bobbing atop his coach, changes the course of everyone's life. He is actually a bounty hunter looking to acquire a slave named Django to identify the three murdering-thieving Brittle brothers, who mask their illegal activity as overseers for hire and have a substantial price on their heads.

Schultz puts forth his proposition with such elegant erudition that it rarely fails to nettle nearly anyone he encounters. This first group, a matted bunch of slavers who spit tobacco and growl at Schultz to "talk English," are typical. The cultural clash becomes one of the film's smartest running gags, and Waltz's delivery, as slick as it is sly, is possibly better than his Nazi colonel in Tarantino's "Basterds," which won him an Oscar.

DiCaprio's villain, who turns up later, is equally exceptional in radically different ways. It is one of the film's conundrums for Foxx, technically the leading man. He does a fine job of melding his newly freed slave into a masterful gunslinger, with all the swagger and retribution that suggests. But there are so many finely crafted performances around him, it's hard for him to rise above the rest.

The side proposition Schultz makes with Django is his freedom once he identifies the Brittles. Over the many campfires that follow, life stories are traded, a friendship is formed and a partnership in the bounty-hunting game is hammered out: "I get paid to shoot white men?"

As satisfying as that is — for us as well — what Django wants most is to buy the freedom of his beloved Broomhilda, their marriage illegal in those times.

Though the bounty-hunting business is filled with scoundrels, slavery is the central villain here. Schultz and Django encounter the many faces of that evil in the course of their travels. A few lend themselves to slapstick, like the birth of the KKK. Others — such as the rarefied world of the bordello beauties and the softer life of the house slaves — get a more ironic treatment. But mostly the director chooses to expose the cruelty. The various types of torture used to punish runaways — attack dogs, hot boxes and, of course, the whipping posts — are unsparingly depicted.

Though badness abounds, evil incarnate thrives in particularly insidious ways in Candyland, a huge Mississippi planation run by its pampered potentate, Calvin. Never has DiCaprio been more sinister than he is here — sarcasm dripping in every honeyed word, insolence flickering in his eyes, hate in his heart. The to-the-death sport of Mandingo fighting is his current obsession and the stage for some of the most difficult scenes to stomach. When Schultz discovers Broomhilda has been sold to Candyland, a major ruse around the sport is concocted in their bid to buy her freedom, and the various complications drive the back half of the film.

Since this is quintessential Tarantino, there is never much time between blood-spilling. Somehow, he and cinematographer Robert Richardson have created a palette that connects the visual sensibility of the Old South and the Old West seamlessly — the blood is just as red and bountiful in both places.

One of Tarantino's greats strengths, and weaknesses, as a filmmaker is the way he falls in love with his actors and his ideas. It makes him reluctant to let go of certain bits and means that others go on too long — often it's the highly choreographed action scenes that he can't bear to end.

This pushes "Django" close to the three-hour mark, and there are a couple of spots when you are sure you've just witnessed a bang-up ending only to find Tarantino setting things up for another round. Editor Fred Raskin, who has worked on a number of the director's projects, must have the patience of Job. I can just imagine the pained expression Tarantino gets when he's forced to make cuts — it's there in his cameo, which might have been a place to start.

Review: Django Unchained Is a Love Story That Ranks Among Tarantino’s BestBy Angela Watercutter12.22.126:30 AM

With all of the hullabaloo surrounding the hyper-real depiction of slavery in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film Django Unchained, most people have probably not heard about what’s actually most shocking about the director’s latest — fantastic — movie: It’s a love story.

In the two decades that Tarantino has been making films, he’s had Mexican stand-offs, slick-talking gangsters, revenge plots and ultra-violence in spades. But with the possible exception of True Romance, love stories have never really been Tarantino’s thing. With Django Unchained, though, he has all the stand-offs and revenge you’ve come to expect, but still manages to turn the story into a romantic tear-jerker. Who knew he had it in him?

But let’s back up. The R-rated Django Unchained, which opens Tuesday, is still a tried-and-true Tarantino flick. Set in the South in the 1850s, the director’s version of a Spaghetti Western opens with Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, who is clearly looking to one-up his Oscar-winning performance in Inglourious Basterds) bloodily “negotiating” the purchase of a slave named Django (fellow Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) from a pair of bumbling traders because the young man can help him find a trio of brothers with bounties on their heads.

(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points to follow.)

After purchasing Django, the German-born Schultz takes him to a nearby town and explains that if Django helps him find the Brittle brothers he will grant him his freedom and share the bounty. But after Schultz learns that Django will use his freedom to rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a plantation (later discovered to be that of Calvin Candie, a diabolical Leonardo DiCaprio), Schultz asks that they team up to spend the winter collecting bounties with the intent of going to retrieve Broomhilda together in the spring.

That’s the set-up, and what follows is nothing less than one of Tarantino’s best efforts. The brutal indignities of slavery and racism in the Antebellum South aren’t exactly easy things to turn into entertainment, but Tarantino’s gift is finding unlikely protagonists – and here he’s found two. Unchained may be about a man’s quest to reunite with his wife, but the relationship between Schultz and Django is the movie’s true love story. (You thought it was going to be the one about saving the girl? It’s that too, but only in the last act. You’ll see.)

Schultz finds slavery absolutely abhorrent and takes the role of liberator earnestly. (The moment when he tells Django he won’t let him go onto Candie’s plantation – Candyland – alone because he feels responsible for the man’s safety might be the most touching exchange the director has ever put on screen.) Waltz and Foxx are in step from the outset, and their banter is classic Tarantino, from the moment the German teaches his apprentice about the “flesh for cash” business of bounty hunting to the moment they execute their gambit at Candyland.

If you liked Waltz’s sinister Nazi act in Basterds you’ll love his turn as a good German here, with a winking tone that levels idiotic plantation owners and outsmarts everyone he encounters. And Foxx’s ease with his character’s arc from slightly gun-shy and contemplative accomplice to gun-slinging badass is fantastic.

The duo is so dynamic that its only competition is the singularly blood-chilling performance of DiCaprio. He’s played tough guys before — The Departed comes to mind – but not so much bad guys. Tarantino has opened up a wicked floodgate in the actor, transforming him into one of the most ruthless characters of his career. As the head of the Candyland plantation, Calvin Candie is already running an inhumane operation, but as one of the top players in the “Mandingo fighting” game (essentially death matches between slaves) he’s undoubtedly the most despicable character DiCaprio has ever embodied.

To say what happens when these two forces — along with with a brilliant Samuel L. Jackson as Candie’s house slave and Kerry Washington as Django’s long-lost wife — collide would be too much. But suffice to say, what’s in the trailer is barely a taste. As with Basterds, Tarantino is on a revenge streak to cinematically right the wrongs of now the last two centuries. By couching his denunciation of slavery in both a buddy picture and a man’s quest to save his princess, he has made his movie more than just another tale of bloody comeuppance. He’s given it heart.